Aimee Morrisonhas been congratulated and gained professional credit for ‘publishing’ her article in a high profile journal. Except, her work will not be printed for another two years. She writes that commercial publishers are exploiting academics’ desire for reputation against a true public good.

Scholarly publishing is broken – at least journal publishing, and at least in my experience–and I don’t want to be complicit in this brokenness anymore, just because it serves some of my purposes, some of the time.

Most loftily, we scholars imagine that we are creating new knowledge, and that new knowledge is a good thing, that it can move our collective human project forward, in some small way. It gets moved only once this new knowledge is publicized. Hence, scholarly publishing.Much less loftily, scholarship is a kind of labour that we exchange for tokens of esteem, power, and reputation, the currency of the academy. The recognized coin of this realm is peer-reviewed, published pages. Hence, scholarly publishing.

I know that I want to create new knowledge, and change the world! And if I can get a full professorship into the bargain, as well as win the disciplinary and institutional pissing contests by which goods are allotted within the Ivory Tower, well, all the better.

These goals can conflict. And so it is that I find myself in the weird position of having an article scheduled to appear in Women Communication Scholarship (pseudonym) and am ambivalent, even angry, about it. My little story indicates at least one small way that scholarly publication is broken, and how some of it is our own damn fault. Is my fault.

What’s making me angry is that I submitted to this journal because of its high reputation, its high rejection rate, its mass adoption by academic libraries … and it turns out that they have a standing two year delay on publication. Let me be perfectly clear: once you go through the whole year of being reviewed and re-reviewed and your piece is accepted, your publication date will be two further years in thefuture. I expressed some shock to the editor when she sent me my August 2014 publication date, in April 2012. She is shocked, too, having witnessed the creeping commercialization of this work over a generation of editorship. But this delay is their new standard. They have a perpetual backlog of submissions and accepted papers, because of their impact, and because they are published by a commercial publisher, who will not let them clear this out with some double print issues, they will have a two year delay for the rest of the world.

Now, I work in new media. My article will be about three years old when it finally appears. Older, actually, because it’s based on a survey that took some time to complete. It will be historical by the time it appears. It’s going to be out of the page proofs stage by September of this year, then sit in a digital drawer for two more years before it gets printed. As the bemused editor wrote to me, the brave new world of academic editing of commercially-published journals “both requires that we publish scholarship and that we don’t publish scholarship.”

This seems really, really wrong.

I consulted Twitter. My friends and colleagues in digital humanities were appalled. Some suggested pulling the article and submitting it somewhere with a faster turnaround. Some suggested back-door self-publishing–that is, use the citation information from the “forthcoming” journal and put the paper online somewhere so people could read it before it becomes irrelevant. I like this idea of guerrilla self-publishing.

I consulted my chair, who consulted my dean. They, by contrast, congratulated me on having my work “appear” in such a high profile venue, and told me to leave it there. I should not retract the article to publish it elsewhere with a lower impact factor, just to get it into readers’ hands. I could put it on my CV, they said, and it would ‘count’ this year. So I will get a raise for heaving my work into a deep well. I must confess I like this idea, too, of appearing successful and important among my peers, and getting a raise, to boot.

To summarize: I get lots of chest-beating institutional credit for this “publication.” But no one actually gets to read my scholarship. It all leaves a very bad taste in my mouth.

This current publishing system is broken. It pits our desires for reputation and stature against a true public good, and removes the whole thing from academic hands to place it into commercial ones who have been quite canny at exploiting our desires for status and our lack of desire for detail work in marketing, bean counting, and publication.

As for me, I’m leaving the article where it is: this is the third journal I’ve submitted it to (it’s interdisciplinary and I have had the misfortune of getting one glowing and one damning review every where else it’s travelled) and I really want this work stamped with approval and circulating, however distant the future in which that happens. As a compromise between my ambitions and my scruples, I asked the editor if I could put a “pre-print” online, and she said it’s technically not allowed but that she understands, informally, that many other people do it. Nudge-nudge, wink-wink.

I ask you: if an article falls into the Taylor and Francis journal system and no one gets to read it, is any new knowledge created? If we’re all circulating these papers “pre-print” why are we bothering with these commercial publications at all, except for personal professional gain? And what should we do?

Note: This article gives the views of theauthor, and not the position of the Impact of Social Sciences blog, nor of the London School of Economics

This post has been republished with the kind permission of the author. The original post and discussion is available here, on Hook and Eye, a blog run by Heather Zwicker (University of Alberta), Aimee Morrison (University of Waterloo) and Erin Wunker (Dalhousie University).

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19 Comments

Yes, it is time to consider guerrilla self-publishing. The facilities are there and so is the will. We’re just waiting for someone to break rank and get on with it.

And why not look for creative forms of publishing while we’re at it? Lots of people who can benefit from our knowledge creation don’t read journal articles. Colleagues and I recently self-published a graphic novel of our research findings into homelessness (Somewhere Nowhere: Lives Without Homes) and it’s publicly available at a very low price. Our partners in the homelessness sector now use it to inform others of the work they do and why it’s important. From the inception of that idea to development to publication and public domain availability = 8 months. No ivory tower politics, no scholarly baggage, no obsession over personal reputation and career development. Just findings ways of telling people about research – this is all it needs to be.

I asked the editor if I could put a “pre-print” online, and she said it’s technically not allowed but that she understands, informally, that many other people do it. Nudge-nudge, wink-wink.

Have you signed a T&F licence form or copyright agreement for your article? If not, request a copy, as this should explicitly detail the use you can make of different versions of your article. There’s some generic advice on the T&F site, but there will be differences between their journals.

A good resource for checking individual journals’ copyright and self-archiving policies is the SHERPA/RoMEO database; most commercially-published journals allow “pre-print self-archiving” (i.e. hosting the pre-refereed version of the article). It’s not the same as having the final version of the aritcle published in an issue, but – within the constraints of the system that we’ve currently got – it goes some way towards disseminating your research now rather than in two years’ time.

Of course, this comment doesn’t address the question as to why academics bother with commercial publishers if they’re already circulating pre-prints.

They don’t have an “early view” or “online first” or whatever? Most journals I publish in (economics and environment) put papers online pretty quickly now once accepted though the official final page numbers can be a long time in coming. Also in economics working papers are standard and accepted form of circulation and are catalogued in major databases (SSRN and RePEc). The review process though from working paper to official publication is very slow.

I feel for you every sentence I read. My advice is to stick the paper on your web site and update the LSE post so everyone knows where it is. There is no excuse for this awful delay. If the publisher demands a take-down (they won’t) make a big public splash. That will get even more readers. Put it in LSE repo as well. If the librarians object tell them that they are acting as police for the publishers (which they often do) rather than serving the instution.

This is sheer incompetence/laziness in what the publisher still thinks is a protected market.

Yes – guerilla action and civil disobedience is coming and every story like this brings it closer.

Publishing working papers on your university’s e-repository is a good way to get research out there fast, and works for pieces of all lengths – too short or too long for journals, for example. I have set up a working paper series with my university’s e-repository for my research group for this reason.

My understanding is that working papers are considered by many journal’s copyright understandings in a similar way to pre-reviewed author’s own copies of their articles and therefore can be published. Articles for peer-reviewed journals can be developed off the back of the working papers once the latter have been published and made available for anyone to download from the e-repository.

Thanks for the rousing call to action! I’ve done my part with my new lab website (see above), which is a web-native self publishing platform built off WordPress and chock full of Open Science APIs, e.g., Figshare.

In economics, papers are published online both before and after acceptance. Publishers have grumbled at first but they have been pointed out that the copyright transfer could not possibly cover versions of the work prior to the accepted one, even if the difference is insignificant (one comme here and there).
Thus, almost every paper recently published in to reviews is available online and actual publication dates just do not matter for research.

I agree that the slow publication process at the journal in question is alarming, but would suggest it does not reflect the norm.

I am a journals publisher and the average speeds in my personal experience are ~12 weeks for full peer review + manuscript revision and then, once accepted, ~5 weeks to full publication. Some journals of course are much faster.

[…] "I ask you: if an article falls into the Taylor and Francis journal system and no one gets to read it, is any new knowledge created? If we’re all circulating these papers “pre-print” why are we bothering with these commercial publications at all, except for personal professional gain? And what should we do?" […]

In academic publishing *diminishing* returns are already a reality. It’s not uncommon to receive a 3% royalty on a $60 book, or even worse, 2 free copies of your own work. In reality I’m now earning three times more on my epubs compared to paper.

Piracy is also a fear, and a reality, as many students (and libraries) won’t pay those prices.

E-books are democratising the market, and it is my belief that they may now be the best route for quality fiction, as well as scholarly factual works.

But being a bestseller will always be a dream for the majority (logically, not everyone can be a mass-market winner!). That said, many writers would be happy with several hundred sales. And that’s more in fact that a specialist academic hardback where the typical print run for a leading publisher is now less than 200. My specialist article on Community Film, on Wikpedia, in contrast, has 450 hits every month. So that’s the difference between traditional academic elitism and a community of readers?

Kindle and Smashwords appear to me be viable option for the aspiring writer – and may in time offer a bridge to traditional paper publication. The latter, of course, can also be achieved at no cost through Amazon’s Print on Demand Service, Createspace.

Academic publishing survives because academics do not in any way depend on their income from it.

[…] Aimee Morrison (@digiwonk) writes: 'Scholarly publishing is broken[…] and I don’t want to be complicit in this brokenness anymore, just because it serves some of my purposes, some of the time. My article will be about three years old when it finally appears. Older, actually, because it’s based on a survey that took some time to complete. It will be historical by the time it appears. It’s going to be out of the page proofs stage by September of this year, then sit in a digital drawer for two more years before it gets printed. As the bemused editor wrote to me, the brave new world of academic editing of commercially-published journals “both requires that we publish scholarship and that we don’t publish scholarship.” This current publishing system is broken. It pits our desires for reputation and stature against a true public good, and removes the whole thing from academic hands to place it into commercial ones who have been quite canny at exploiting our desires for status and our lack of desire for detail work in marketing, bean counting, and publication.' […]

[…] Aimee Morrison (@digiwonk) writes: 'Scholarly publishing is broken[…] and I don’t want to be complicit in this brokenness anymore, just because it serves some of my purposes, some of the time. My article will be about three years old when it finally appears. Older, actually, because it’s based on a survey that took some time to complete. It will be historical by the time it appears. It’s going to be out of the page proofs stage by September of this year, then sit in a digital drawer for two more years before it gets printed. As the bemused editor wrote to me, the brave new world of academic editing of commercially-published journals “both requires that we publish scholarship and that we don’t publish scholarship.” This current publishing system is broken. It pits our desires for reputation and stature against a true public good, and removes the whole thing from academic hands to place it into commercial ones who have been quite canny at exploiting our desires for status and our lack of desire for detail work in marketing, bean counting, and publication.' […]

[…] Aimee Morrison has been congratulated and gained professional credit for ‘publishing’ her article in a high profile journal. Except, her work will not be printed for another two years. She writes that commercial publishers are exploiting academics’ desire for reputation against a true public good. […]

[…] years before your article sees the light of day, in fact in a recent post on the LSE Impact Blog, Aimee Morrison told of her horror of receiving a publication date 2 years in the future. Some fields, mine […]

Education credentials and other academic naivete are falling in despair, likewise goes for the so called Journals, of course, there is still hope out there but there is more hope to get a message across with what is still viewed as a somewhat humble media, or self-publishing.

The audience is what matters in any event. And it seems that audiences are getting the message: news are not informing, schools are not educating and hospitals are not healing.

[…] years before your article sees the light of day, in fact in a recent post on the LSE Impact Blog, Aimee Morrison told of her horror of receiving a publication date 2 years in the future. Some fields, mine […]